Mint Primer | Stargate Wars: Where is India in the AI infra race?
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. Donald Trump has announced a $500-billion venture called Stargate (the name is inspired by sci-fi) to build AI-focused data centres and other infrastructure in the US. The aim is to lead in AI, create 100,000 jobs, and outpace China.
Mint explores the implications for India: It’s a $500-billion joint venture with OpenAI, Oracle, SoftBank, and MGX to build AI-focused infrastructure including data centres across the US over the next four years—Trump’s first major business initiative since returning to office. The project is aimed at countering China’s AI advance, stressing the role of geopolitics in tech policies and strategies. The new company will initially deploy $100 billion.
SoftBank will fund the venture, while OpenAI will oversee operations. Key partners include Arm, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Oracle. Construction is underway in Texas, with additional sites under review.
Read more: Honey, I’m home: Is this the era of domestic robots? The US leads the global AI ecosystem, excelling in research, machine learning models, private investment, and job creation. However, while China-based Baidu’s Ernie bot may not match OpenAI’s ChatGPT, China ranks second in AI, as per Stanford University rankings. China attracted $67.2 billion in AI-related investment in 2023 compared to $7.8 billion for the US, and is way ahead in AI patents and notable machine learning models (61 vs 15).
China is also innovating fast with AI lab DeepSeek’s R1 open-source reasoning model rivalling OpenAI’s o1 in performance across reasoning tasks and costing less. Nvidia, the world’s largest AI firm, relies on Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company for chips. China views Taiwan as a breakaway province.
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